


Banana Bread Bonding

by Aryashi



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Baking, Co-Authored By Carolina's Ability to stalk people until she gets what she wants, Food, Gen, Learning to Chill: A Half Assed Course by Dexter Grif
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 01:46:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17173499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aryashi/pseuds/Aryashi
Summary: And now.Carolina was trying, with all that Freelancer Blue Team Dramatic Energy.To get Grif.Totrain her.Torelax.“Simmons,” Grif said, while staring at the ceiling, lying on Simmons’ bed. “Kill me.”





	Banana Bread Bonding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amvial](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=amvial).



> Prompt: boom top faves are grif and carolina, i like wlw ships don't matter which, i'm also a fan of banana bread but that has nothing to do w this BUT if i can get a good recipe.....that'd b appreciated

Carolina didn’t give up easy. Grif knew that because he’d had more than a two minute conversation with her. He knew Carolina got  _ obsessive  _ because he’d spent an unfortunately significant amount of time with her during a “pretty rough emotional time”, to quote Donut. If you asked Grif to describe it he’d probably say something like “while she was slowly and painfully going bugfuck nuts and dragging all of us down with her.” Maybe more swearing, depending on the mood. 

But really, Grif couldn’t work up that anger anymore. On top of the simple fact that holding a grudge took energy, Carolina had the unfortunate luck of being born both a freelancer and a Blue. Yeah yeah, the war was fake, but. Still. Scientists agreed, Blue and Freelancer were both diagnosable illness. Symptoms include entirely too much drama and giving entirely too many shits about it. That was Carolina all over, especially the “giving entirely too many shits”. 

So when Carolina approached Grif one day out of the clear blue alien moon sky about learning to relax, Grif knew he was fucked. Fucked like Luke at the beginning of Last Jedi fucked.

There is no  _ trying  _ to relax. And  _ trying  _ was Carolina’s body and soul. Grif once thought Simmons was the most extreme concentration of  _ trying  _ you could find in real life, but Carolina blew him out of the fucking water. Like comparing an assault rifle to an entire battalion of spaceship sized lasers. Simmons  _ tried  _ and he tried a lot, but he eventually gave up. Or figured out a work around, or even realized what he’d been trying for wasn’t worth all that effort in the first place. 

Carolina didn’t do that. Carolina kept right on  _ trying  _ until either the world relented or she broke. 

And now.

Carolina was trying, with all that Freelancer Blue Team Dramatic Energy.

To get Grif.

To  _ train her.  _

To  _ relax.  _

“Simmons,” Grif said, while staring at the ceiling, lying on Simmons’ bed. “Kill me.”

“Chickenshits who hide from things in my room don’t get the sweet mercy of death,” Simmons said, without missing a beat. 

\---

At first, Grif figured he could just avoid Carolina until she got frustrated and gave up.

Delusionally optimistic, perhaps. But it had been Grif’s signature move for nigh on his entire life. Can’t beat the classics, and simple is best. He shored up all his best hiding spots with provisions (every flavor of doritos, tons of soda, and those experimental non-frozen instant pizzas that probably gave you cancer) and settled in for the long haul.

Carolina found his first spot within the hour.

His second didn’t last half that.

The third lasted so little time even Grif, immune to most any shame, refused to commit it to memory 

Hiding clearly wasn’t going to work here. 

Time for plan B.

\---

The kitchen was, for once, empty. Sarge had the rest of the reds out looking for more dinosaurs to fight, and Caboose dragged the rest of the blues along with them to ‘make more friends” or whatever. 

“Okay,” Grif said, wandering into the space as slowly and without purpose as he could possibly manage. “You wanna learn how to relax?”

“Yes. Obviously.” Carolina had her arms crossed, head high, shoulders still. She wasn’t in armor, at Grif’s insistence, and looked about as comfortable as a cat in a bath. 

“We’re gonna start with the easy shit. Real low level relaxing.” Grif went to dig around in ‘his’ kitchen cupboard, in as much as anything could be individually owned in this base.  

“... Are we going to smoke something?”

Grif barked out a laugh. “Holy shit no, you’ve got a fucking  _ long  _ way to go before you try weed.”

“Are you saying I couldn’t handle marijuana?” A thread of threat underlied her voice, but Grif held all the cards. Piss off the teacher, and the teacher leaves. Making the teacher leave in disgust was enough like failure that Carolina would never tolerate it. 

“I sure am. You’d get paranoid.”

“I would not.”  

“Trust me, you would. No, we’re going back to basics. Ha!” Grif questing fingers finally found the object of his desire. Jammed into the back of his stash, right behind the box of triple stuff oreos. He pulled them out and presented it to Carolina with a bit a flourish. 

“Those are bananas.”

“Yep.”

And they were. A bunch of bananas, grown on Chorus, delivered to Iris a few days ago.

“Simmons shoves fruit in there, like he thinks that I’ll eat it just because it’s close.” The fact Simmons was right went tactfully unstated. That wasn’t relevant to the current conversation. “I think Donut gave him the idea. Asshole. But anyway, these are perfect for our purposes.”

Carolina’s bafflement was transitioning into amusement. “Perfect for what? Those bananas are bruised.”

Bruised was an understatement. Being shoved into the back of an already packed storage space the bananas were more brown with yellow spots than anything else. They had to be the most bruised bananas Grif had ever seen.

“Man, you really never did anything fun your whole life, did you?”

Carolina shrugged, but didn’t refute the assertion.  

“These are perfect because we’re going to be mashing them up into the easiest fuckin thing to make in the known universe. We’re making banana bread.”

Carolina raised an eyebrow, but for the first time since the whole thing started, she nodded along. “I’ve heard baking is relaxing.”

Shit. This wasn’t working. Grif had to up the ante. 

“Sure. But only if you do it right,” Grif said, words falling out of his mouth.

“Do it  _ right?”  _ Carolina said, and ooooh Grif hit that herve with a goddamn sledgehammer.  _ Excellent.  _

“I can already feel your perfectionism Blue Team Freelancer hang ups revving from all the way over here. You’d do something stupid like measure by  _ weight  _ with a  _ digital scale,  _ or throw out the first one because you didn’t get exactly the right amount of bananas from the recipe, or whatever the fuck else.”

There it was, the shoulders stiff and the hackles up. Perfect. If Grif played his cards right, Carolina would never ask for chill out lessons from him ever again.

Now for the finishing blow.

“So we aren’t even looking up a recipe.”

“What.” Carolina really had a way with words, that singular syllable contained whole volumes of horror and outrage. 

“Yep. We’re just gonna fucking wing it. Made this stuff a bunch when I was a kid, it’s got like six ingredients, and most of them are bananas and brown sugar.”

Already Grif could see the idea getting under her skin. Someone this obsessed with doing things right? Baking without a recipe should send her screaming for the hills.

Except Grif miscalculated. Like many people before him, he made one huge mistake.

He underestimated just how stubborn Carolina was.

She took a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. Like she was bracing to get a bullet fished out of her. “Alright. If that’s what… you think I need to do. To relax. I’ll do it.”

Grif raised an eyebrow. 

“Shut up and get the measuring cups.”

Grif grinned; a grim gleaming Grinchy grin. 

“Who said anything about measuring?”

Oh, Grif was never in a billion years going to get to land a real blow on Carolina in hand to hand sparring, no matter how friendly, but he imagined it would create that shocked and horrified expression on her face. He wished he had a camera.

“I am the master here. And I say get the ingredients.”

“Are you going to tell me what those are, or will  _ guessing  _ help me relax?”

Grif honestly thought about it. But, hell, he did actually like banana bread, so as funny as that disaster would be, he shook his head. “Nah. Grab some flour, brown sugar-”

“We have that?”

“Yeah, Donut requested it for some spa shit. Anyway, eggs, salt, butter, uuuuh…” Grif drew a blank. “That orange box you use for laundry.”

“... Baking soda isn’t just a brand name for detergent?” Carolina said.

There was an achingly long silence.

“What the hell was your  _ life?”  _ Grif asked.

“Busy. Competitive. Full of MREs.”

“Jesus.”

Ingredients gathered, Grif leaned against the counter and started peeling bananas.

“You’re gonna want a lot of flour, a little baking soda, and like, two pinches of salt.”

“Can you be more  _ specific?” _ Carolina asked, grinding her teeth oh so slightly.

“Nope. Just toss that shit into a bowl.”

With aching slowness, Carolina spoonfeed the flour into a mixing bowl. Like she was waiting for Grif’s expression to tell her the perfect amount of flour to get the recipe exactly right. Grif, of course, placidly continued peeling bananas. 

Eventually Carolina hesitated. It did look like too much flour, but Grif wasn’t gonna say anything. She took two spoonfuls out, put another one back in, like she was going to perfectly eyeball the right amount somehow. Grif gave her nothing.

“This is ridiculous. What does this accomplish?”

_ Making you think this stupid so you stop hounding me,  _ Grif thought, but instead he said, “Patience, young padawan. Keep going.”

And Carolina did keep going. She followed Grif’s vague directions from his own half remembered times making banana bread a fucking lifetime ago. It really was a super fucking easy recipe, basically impossible to fuck up entirely. The vegetarian meatloaf of bread. Or cake. Banana bread wasn’t actually bread, was it? 

Whatever.Ingredients mixed and placed in a pan, the only thing left to do was wait an hour for the thing to cook. 

So Grif and Carolina ended up sitting at the kitchen table, staring at each other. Grif suddenly and deeply regretted not wearing armor. At least then he could be playing Candy Crush on his HUD.

Grif didn’t do awkward silence. Hadn’t been able to for a long, long time. So before his brain could catch up and veto, his mouth said, “So why the sudden need to relax?”

Carolina did the exact opposite of relax. She tensed up like she’d been accused of something. Okay, now Grif was on to something. So he pushed forward.

“I mean, you seem to have the whole hyper ambitious thing mostly working for you. Settled into your niche. Changing now takes like. Work. Way more work than you were already doing.”

Grif hated this. He hated everything about this. But if he was going to get out of this in the future, he had to resort to drastic measures. Nothing made one of this crazy crew run for the hills like talking about  _ Feelings. _ Unless you were Donut. Or Caboose. But they didn’t count. 

Carolina did seriously look like she wanted to run for the hills. But before Grif could go for another swing, Carolina said “Maybe if I’d had more downtime, or if we hadn’t been running so hard-”

There were days, months, entire  _ years _ Grif wished he was a stupid man. Stupid people don’t worry about anything, stupid people are confident, and stupid people don’t figure shit out so fast. A stupid person wouldn’t have looked at Carolina and seen how she started at the floor, deliberately looking away from the empty, hologramless air over her right shoulder. 

Grif coughed. “Okay, lesson one. That?” Grif gestured at Carolina. “That is the opposite of relaxing. So quit it.”

“I thought the baking was lesson one.” 

“No, that’s building to the lesson. Lesson two. I totally planned this from the get go.”

“Uh huh.” Carolina said, and wow, it was kind of weird to see that half smile she got instead of just hearing it in her voice. 

“Who’s the teacher here again?”

“You are.”

“Damn right,” Grif said. He leaned back in his chair.

The rest of the cook time passed in non-awkward silence, which Grif could handle just fine. The kitchen slowly filled with the smell of banana bread. Damn, Grif forgot how good that smell was. Carolina enjoyed it too, if her expression was anything to go by.

Finally, Grif looked at the time and said, “Eh, it’s probably done.”

“Probably?”

“No exacts, this is our expectation free banana bread.”

It came out a little lumpy, and the outer crust was a little tough, but the bread itself was just as sweet and warm as it should have been.

“See? Lesson two.” Grif said, wolfing down a second piece. “Shit that isn’t perfect can still be really goddamn good.”

Carolina smiled, munching through her own piece like she wanted to slow down and enjoy it but wasn’t entirely sure on the mechanics of doing that. 

“I think that’s a pretty good lesson.”

“... Fuck.”

“You were trying to scare me off.”

“Uuuhhh-”

“And it didn’t work.”

Grif sighed. “Can we at least schedule this or something?”

Carolina hmmed. “Nah. No exacts, remember?”

Grif snorted. 

**Author's Note:**

> The request asked for banana bread, and the muse provided 
> 
> https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/20144/banana-banana-bread/
> 
> I've actually made this recipe it's pretty good and literally about as easy as the fic makes it out to be


End file.
